The email edition of TBTF underwent a redesign beginning with the
1997-02-11 issue, and the old-fashioned,
tacky, Ascii-art Lips that had been a masthead feature for two years
were retired. Due to (a small amount of) popular demand, The Lips will live
on, enshrined here, in perpetuity.

In June of 1995 I went lips-shopping on the Web. There were only a few sources
of clip art I could locate, most at universities. Yahoo was just about the only
usable Web resource for finding such stuff. It may still have been run off of
Jerry Yang's server in his dorm room at Stanford, URL
http://akibono.stanford.edu/~yahoo; surely yahoo.com had not yet gone live in
the spring of that year. Lycos was in operation at CMU, managed apparently
single-handedly by its inventor "Fuzzy" Mauldin. The first commercial search
service, Infoseek, had opened its doors. Alta Vista would not burst onto the
scene until December of that year.

Here is the rendering of a pair of lips I found deep in a non-commercial
clip-art repository at CMU.

This artwork was replaced by The Current Lips across the TBTF site in August
of 1996.